Saturday, June 20, 2009

Unions Add Their Weight in Iranian Protest

The Autobus Workers Union has joined with the Auto Workers Union in criticizing the ruling government's brutal crackdown of the students, shopworkers, businesspeople and parents who have taken to the streets in the wake of what many believe to have been a rigged election.

In a stunning rebuke to the threats issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khomeini that the violence that meets the protesters will be of their own making, thousands have taken to the streets u. In doing so they will have to dodge the batons of the Iranian police and the bullets of the Basij-a brute squad made up of irregulars and thugs who form the steel toe of the ruling class.

In addition to the world-wide rebuke that would follow a violent suppression of the protests (which the already blighted regime may swat aside), the efforts of the industrial workers and others to cause slowdowns or even strikes may turn a protest into a full-blown revolution.

The people of Iran who have taken to the streets did not do so to overthrow the government, they merely wanted to see what little legitimacy existed return to the elective process.

Mousavi, the man who challenged the sitting President Ahmadinejad, is known to be a hard-liner himself. In his previous role as prime minister in the 1980's. Mousavi is believed to have given the approval to obtain the centrifuges used for uranium enrichment.

In the Iranian sphere, reformer is a relative term.

Yet the regime may have taken its game to far, tossing aside any pretense of self-rule. Thus, those who saw their country's future diminish under the Ahmadinejad presidency-the young, the reformist, the realists-saw the specter of their fate in the regime's meat-paw manipulation of the election.